General news
1. Congratulations on the appointment of the new HERD journal editorial team. They will take up their term in January 2017:

* Executive Editors: Dr Wendy Green (University of Tasmania) and Dr Craig Whitsed (Murdoch University)
* Co-Editors: Dr Amani Bell (The University of Sydney), Dr Bernadette Knewstubb & Dr Stephen Marshall (Victoria University Wellington), and Dr Ly Tran (Deakin University)
* Book Reviews Editor: Dr Deanne Gannaway (The University of Queensland)
* Special Issues Editor: Dr Kelly Matthews (The University of Queensland)

We wish the incoming team much success in leading the journal to new endeavours.

2. Issue 35(4) of the journal has just been released. Visit the contents page<http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cher20/current>.

3. Virtual Issues of the HERD journal were released in the first half of this year:

* A tribute to the scholarship of Professor Alison Lee<http://explore.tandfonline.com/content/ed/alison-lee> (a collaboration with the journals Teaching in Higher Education & Studies in Higher Education) was launched at the Quality in Postgraduate Research (QPR) conference in April 2016.
* From identity to identities: a story of fragmentation (<http://explore.tandfonline.com/content/ed/academic-identities-vsi>launched at the 5th International Academic Identities conference in June 2016).

4. For keen followers of the impact game, the mid-year release of the 2015 journal impact factors sees the HERD journal impact factor down slightly from 0.991 (2014) to 0.896 (2015) while at the same time, the journal has risen from 5th to 3rd in Google’s ranking of Higher Education journals<https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=soc_highereducation>.

5. There is usually a little movement among the group of dedicated HERD Associate Editors (AEs). We say goodbye and offer our thanks to those AEs who have recently left our ranks: Clinton Golding and Sarah Stein from NZ, and Eva Bendix Petersen (now in Denmark).

6. Members of the editorial team Barbara Grant and Tai Peseta facilitated a Pre-conference workshop at HERDSA 2016 in Fremantle Being a successful academic author? There was lots of interest, a good turn out, and this workshop was our last HERDSA conference as an editorial team.

7. Social media: If you are not yet following @HERDJournal on twitter, make sure you do. We are just below 1400 followers, and growing strong each week. Don’t forget that the HERD journal also has a You Tube channel<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqf-DIoutKhOWjd_E-JWhFw>. Authors are welcome to use the channel to engage the broader public with their research. If you would like to take advantage, contact Tai Peseta (tai.peseta at sydney.edu.au<mailto:tai.peseta at sydney.edu.au>) for the remainder of the year until the new editorial team takes over.

Special Issues
The 2017 Special Issue ‘Academic life in the measured university: pleasures, paradoxes and politics’ is currently in production, with guest editors Tai Peseta, Simon Barrie & Jan McLean, and dedicated Associate Editors, Lisa Thomas, Tamsin Hinton-Smith and Stephanie Doyle. We received over 80 extended abstracts for consideration, and in February this year, invited around 35 full paper submissions. At this stage, the Special Issue is due for publication early in 2017.

Points for Debate
While the new HERD editorial team begins its planning phase, we know that they are unlikely to continue with the Points for Debate section of the journal. The last Points for Debate piece will be the final issue of 2017. If you have any questions, contact the editor Tai Peseta (tai.peseta at sydney.edu.au<mailto:tai.peseta at sydney.edu.au>).

Tai’s Pick
Issue 35, Vol 4
Michael Haug’s salutary article ‘Complaints and troubles talk about the English language skills of international students in Australian universities’ reminds us that there is still considerable work to do to think well (and with complexity) about how the ‘English language’ problem has come to stand in for arguments about the declining standards of Australian universities. His study seeks out the voices of a small group of international students, and by drawing on traditions of pragmatics and ethnomethodological conversation analysis, Haug demonstrates that there are important differences between what he describes as troubles talk (expressions of affect), and the focus on complaint (expressions of moral indignation). For Haug, these framing devices have become conflated in the way we see, and have knowledge of, international students. By setting the analytical stage in this way, Haug invites us to reflect more critically on our work as teachers, researchers, support staff, and policy makers in our treatment of, and support for, international students. Read the abstract here<http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2015.1137878>.